Where the Roads Have No Name

Over decades and centuries, Vermont has become filigreed with rural pathways that hardly anyone but the law can see. Norman Arsenault, a seventy-four-year-old retired forester, has turned discovering them into something of an art form.

Photograph courtesy Geoff Manaugh

Sooner or later, every road comes to an end—but not in Vermont. In other states, a road that goes unused for a reasonable period of time is legally discontinued; in Vermont, any road that was ever officially entered into a town’s record books remains legally recognized, indefinitely. It doesn’t matter if the road has not been travelled in two hundred years, or if it was never travelled at all, or if it was merely surveyed and never actually built. Any ancient road that exists on paper—unless it has been explicitly discontinued—is considered a public highway in the eye of the law.

As a result, over decades and centuries, Vermont has become filigreed with rural roads and pathways that hardly anyone but the law can see. In 2003, a couple in the town of Chittenden was denied permission to build an extension onto their home when an independent researcher, hired by the town, discovered an ancient mail route passing right through their property. In the tiny hamlet of Granville, a survey revealed a long-lost, invisible throughway passing through the wooded front yard of a mountain home; a pending lawsuit may open the road to traffic from timber-company trucks. In 2006, prompted by a groundswell of complaints from Vermonters unable to obtain title insurance for their properties or to keep snowmobilers out of their flowerbeds, the state government passed Act 178, which aimed to brush away the infrastructural cobwebs. The act gave the towns until February of 2010 to identify and map any potential ancient roads within their borders; these would then be reviewed by the state and added to Vermont’s official highway map over the next five years. Any ancient road not added to the state map by July 1, 2015, would be considered discontinued.

The Act’s passage inspired a kind of statewide archive fever. Interested citizens, outdoors enthusiasts, industrial forestry advocates, and concerned homeowners began visiting town-records offices and poring through vaults, shelves, and filing cabinets stuffed with yellowing and re-bound handwritten notes, property transfers, mortgage deeds, and step-by-step narrations of particular routes across the landscape dating back as far as the seventeen-nineties. In a few cases, the ancient road under review actually predated Vermont’s statehood.

Norman Arseneault took to the project of road rediscovery with the zeal of a convert—or, perhaps more accurately, with the enthusiasm of a retiree looking for something to do with his not inconsiderable reserves of energy. Arseneault, who is seventy-four and a sturdy five-feet-six, lives in Granville, about an hour south of Montpelier in a broad valley where the White and Mad Rivers unravel into a tangle of brooks and streams. His obsessive search for Vermont’s lost byways has resulted in a self-published book, “A History of Granville Roads,” which is due out later this summer.

I met Arseneault on the morning after the solstice, in Granville’s town hall. He was there with Kathy Werner, the town clerk; they had laid out several charts documenting the region’s mountainous lot lines and a stack of old books from the town vault. Arseneault had turned the rediscovery of ancient roads into something of an art form, reading back through forty-two volumes of Granville land transactions and property deeds, deciphering ornate handwriting, and then using those clues to figure out where, in the heavily forested landscape, the lost connections between long abandoned farmsteads and renamed villages might lie.

Finding even a seemingly well-documented stretch of ancient roadway involved “interviewing old-timers in the area,” Arseneault said. “It included searching all the records. It included going out in the field, once we found a survey—and it was quite a mystery, in a lot of surveys, as to where the roads were. There were no road numbers; there were no road names. It was just bearings and distances.”

Several of the roads that older townspeople confidently remembered taking seventy or eighty years ago simply could not be found either on the ground or in the town records. It was as much anthropological fieldwork as it was land surveying, sometimes more myth than geography. Arsenault flipped to a few pages in Granville’s first town survey book to convey the difficulty involved in interpreting these old coördinates. Roads were described as commencing at stumps, or “beginning on the old road near a maple tree.” They turned at unidentified bends in unidentified rivers and streams. The entire survey for a route that Arseneault still can’t locate—he thinks it might be a lost bridge—describes “a road across the river, beginning in the middle of the road from the Burnham farm to the river on the southerly bank of said river, thence north twenty-one east six rods to the road on the opposite side of the river.” There are ancient roads intersecting with other ancient roads that themselves can’t be located. There are labyrinths atop labyrinths.

Arseneault had spent his career working for the U.S. Forest Service in Oregon, California, Colorado, and many other states, and it was clear that he would rather be having this conversation outdoors. “I’m a professional forester,” he said. “I’m interested in surveying and finding things in the woods. The old roads lead to beautiful old foundations, abandoned farms, apple orchards, chimneys standing with nothing else around them.” We hopped into his truck and drove several miles out into the forest along the meandering Patterson Brook Road, where we eventually pulled over and parked.

Arseneault led the way on foot into the trees, pushing through heavy branches and underbrush. As we slipped down rain-slick slopes and squelched through thick grass, it was hard not to feel as though we were effectively lost in the forest. To Arseneault, however, we were walking down old streets and property lines belonging to a long-forgotten part of town, one still filled with memories of the people who lived there long ago. At one point, we found a corroded wheel rim leaning against some trees; at another, we pushed aside some fast-growing plants and found ourselves looking down into a nineteenth-century foundation pit. These routes—not despite but precisely because they are so difficult to find—deserved to be preserved and given names, even plaques and signage, Arseneault said: “We already protect historic buildings. These are just as valuable.”

About an hour into our hike, Arseneault stopped to consult a three-ring binder that he had been carrying; it was bursting with heavily annotated maps of the invisible roads around us, each page covered with adhesive tags, mud stains, and stripes of Wite-Out. It was now just past noon, and we were both beginning to sweat in the rising humidity. Arseneault pointed over his shoulder at a withered apple tree otherwise hidden in a thicket on the southeastern edge of the road.

“This used to be an orchard,” he said. I looked farther into the woods and began to see unkempt apple trees everywhere around us, extending back into the forest out of sight. The geometry of an abandoned farm gradually became visible, with a half-collapsed stone wall snaking downhill and camouflaged by the underbrush. The property had been uninhabited probably since the eighteen-forties, Arseneault said; the old roads that led to it were now faded and overgrown.

Johnathan Croft, a G.I.S. specialist with the Vermont Agency of Transportation’s Mapping Section, told me that Arseneault had set something of a standard for rediscovering the state’s ancient roads. Croft and his mapping team, working in Montpelier, have been given the unenviable task of reconciling hand-gathered descriptions of ancient roads and combining them with the state’s official highway map. Some of the most important clues have come from an unexpected source, an airborne LiDAR survey commissioned in 2011 to assess storm damage from Hurricane Irene. LiDAR is a form of radar that can see through vegetation to map the topography underneath in astonishing detail. Croft pulled the LiDAR model up on his computer model to show me. There were outlines of limekilns hidden in the trees, old quarrying sites, and capillary-like whorls of trails and ancient roads that even the most eagle-eyed hiker would be hard-pressed to detect.

According to Act 178, one factor in how an ancient road is added to the state map is “whether clearly observable physical evidence exists.” The advent of new visualization technologies such as LiDAR promises to give new meaning to the phrase. The Act was written with the aim of putting history, or at least some of history, finally to rest, but it might well have the opposite effect, breathing life into roads that perhaps even Arseneault could not have discovered. July 1st will come and go, but the disputes engendered by Vermont’s ancient roads are nowhere close to ending. “There’s a certain element of clarity,” Croft said with a laugh. “But there’s some murk still in the process.”

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